On-Demand Tutoring — From Teacher to Feature
On-demand tutoring, the possibility to connect with a live tutor anytime — anywhere, is quickly becoming a must-have feature for edtech startups. Instead of booking a session with a tutor at a fixed date and time, students can now go online and pick from a list of tutors who are available at this moment.
This instant gratification or instant service mindset is partially driven by services like Apple’s Siri or Google’s Google Now. Sure, those are not humans giving the answer to questions, still users around the globe quickly got used to this new world where an answer is just an “OK Computer” away.
It’s easy to imagine a not so distant future where Siri, Google Now, and other services will be able to answer more complex questions and help with homework or exam preparation. In the meantime humans have to fill the gap and, telling by the number of edtech startups who implement on-demand tutoring, there are enough people who are willing to work as on-demand tutors.
The thing that worries me is that those tutors are increasingly shifting from the core of an education service to a mere feature1. Like an API or extension they are attached to a core product that provides most of the service. The tutor becomes a helpdesk worker, a trouble shooter.
Adaptive or personalized learning algorithms are taking over the lesson planning and individualization of a course. Interactive quizzes and apps are taking care of repetition, and pre-recorded video lessons are the new lecture. The only space that is left for human interaction in this scenario is the moment a student gets stuck and the algorithms are not able to explain or help the learner solve her problem.
But what will happen when algorithms are capable of adapting the way they understand and explain complex problems? Though we might still be far away from a program that will pass the turing test, it is also clear that learners are more interested in getting a quick answer to solve a problem rather than chatting with a machine anyway.
At that moment the teacher will have become a retired feature.
Picture by Royce Blair via Flickr
